Waratah Wedding Bouquets

Waratah Wedding Bouquets

Comment   

Waratah season is short and sweet.  They are very much a spring flower.

Swallows Nest Farm Waratah Bouquet

  This year has been unusually warm and the waratah season seemed to fly by more quickly than usual.  Here at Swallows Nest Farm, you can see the first pickable blooms in mid to late September, with October being the high season. Some late flowering varieties keep going until mid December, but due to the warmth, it been a shorter season.  It's made me a bit sad, and so to console myself, I've compiled a little collection of waratah wedding bouquets. 

Flowergirl's bouquet Swallows Nest Farm

Some are my own, and some are ones I've found on my internet travels.  All of them feature the wonderful waratah in different ways and different styles. 

These first two bouquets are from an early October wedding.  The waratah's are just coming into their peak season and are vibrant and fresh.  The colour in these "Shady Lady" variety is really rich.  Teamed with the lipstick boronia it makes for a really colourful statement.

This one is an early spring bouquet from mid September.  The waratah in this bouquet is not fully open and the colour is not as vibrant, but the pink makes for a more subtle look and I love the petals still arching up around the flower.  Pretty and fresh.  

Good Grace and Humour

What a great image!  I love the red and white!  In this wedding the white waratah makes an appearance.  I think it really works!

Good Grace and Humour

Red waratah for the bride and white for the bridesmaids.  Fabulous!

October Waratah Wedding Swallows Nest Farm

From mid October, this bouquet celebrates the waratah in its peak season here in Tasmania.  The first early Tasmanian waratah makes an appearance towards the back left.  The Tasmanian waratah starts in October and peaks in November, usually, with some lingering into December. 

October Waratah Wedding Swallows Nest Farm

 I love this combination of fresh colours celebrating spring.  Simple style to highlight the flowers at their best. 

Spring Native Wedding Swallows Nest Farm

This trio of bouquets is from early October.  Lots of cream and white, with touches of gold from the Dryandra/Banksia Formosa make a great background for the waratahs.

November Native Wedding Swallows Nest Farm

Novermber and the first of the Pincushion proteas have emerged but the waratahs are still going.  I have found that our white waratahs flower a little later than the red, and this means that they can be available for weddings as the weather warms up.  The texture the waratah gives is an important ingredient of the success of this bouquet.  I love playing with colour blends using the white waratahs too.   

White Waratah Spring bouquet, Swallows Nest Farm

This bride's bouquet features a white waratah too, but with a different style and colour scheme.  The theme was "rustic vintage style" in classic pink and soft tones.

White Waratah Spring Wedding Swallows Nest Farm

I love the texture in the bouquet.  A more subtle colour scheme lets you really play with texture.

Tasmanian Waratah bouquet Swallows Nest Farm

November is Tasmanian Waratah month here at Swallows Nest Farm, and a gorgeous bride who loves her Tassie Waratahs chose November for her wedding so she could have one of her favourite flowers as the centrepiece of her bouquet.  Simple, beautiful fresh flowers.

Swallows Nest Farm 

A wedding featuring the Tasmanian waratah couldn't have been held in a more perfect setting.  This classic Tasmanian beach scene with the gorgeous blue of the sea and the characteristic orange lichen on the rocks.  Beautiful!

Waratah and Kangaroo Paw by Good Grace and Humour

I love this dramatic combination of Kargaroo Paw and Waratah.  What a great bouquet!  A truly Australian native wedding bouquet with the waratah as the star.

Field and Coppice Floral Design

I love this joyful bouquet by Field and Coppice Floral Design in the Canberra area.  The rich red waratahs in the centre of the bouquet are just beautiful.  

Field and Coppice Floral Design

This bouquet of waratahs is also by Field and Coppice, but it has a completely different feel.  Its simple, understated and old-world, and just gorgeous!

Waratahs are a stunning spring favourite for weddings. Keep an eye out for them!

Native Spring Wedding Flowers

Native Spring Wedding Flowers

Comment   

October is a brilliant month for native flowers.  A bride is spoilt for choice!  Last October I was privileged to be able to provide flowers for a wedding at MONA in Hobart.  The bride and groom were from Sydney so NSW Waratah's were a perfect choice.  My Telopea Speciosissima hybrids were just bursting with colour.  

The bride was wearing gold, so the red was really a standout colour.  I added Dryandra Formosa flowers to tie in the gold.  They are at their height in early to mid spring.  

The Dryandra leaves also add a  lovely textural quality to the bouquet.  They have a fine, zig-zag shape and fall at nice angles.

For the flower girl's bouquet, I chose some smaller waratahs to keep the size and weight manageable.   The bright pink is added by Boronia which not only creates a burst of colour, but smells divine, making it a pleasure to handle.  I used Leucadendron Lemon Spice, a selection of the female Leucadendron Discolour.  In spring its colour is spectacular, changing from a sage green to a gorgeous creamy ivory with a pink blush.  

Another ingredient I loved using for this wedding was some fresh green eucalyptus pods, immature and not ready to flower until summer.  In their immature state, they are bright green, and the textural quality adds another layer of interest to a bouquet bursting with spring goodness.  

In early October, the Berzelia or Button Bush is just ready to begin picking.  The "buttons" are green and they add another fresh textural layer to the spring native bouquet.  

One of the things I loved about this wedding was that the bride was particular about the boutonnieres.  The groom wanted white.  For the Fathers, I was given pictures of the suits and ties they were wearing, so I could create something that worked well.  It was a great way to work.  

White was a little tricky with so much colour available!  I used both wax flower and thryptomene (another duo that are fabulously perfumed) teamed with Berzelia and an immature Leucadendron Silver Tree cone.

The Silver Tree cone really glows. 

For the Fathers' boutonnieres, I used small waratahs.  I usually cull these smaller flowers, pruning them off the bushes and leaving them.  They are pretty but too small and often at odd angles so no good for selling wholesale.   I decided that they were perfect button holes for this spring wedding though - like a scaled down version of the main bouquet flowers. I like the way the red bracts surrounding the flower sit at interesting angles.

For the other boutonnieres, I used Dryandra.   These Australian Natives have a strong almost citrusy smell that can be a bit overpowering when they are first picked so I pick them a week early and sit them in the cold room till it fades a little.  They are teamed up with Lipstick Boronia and wax flower.  

Such a joyous combination of spring goodness! 

Natives are a vibrant and memorable choice for a spring wedding.

Waratah!

Waratah!

Comment   

Spring means Waratahs, the irrepressible native flower that's bold and impossible to ignore!  Waratahs are native to Australia and are part of the proteaceae family of plants.  The name Waratah is an aboriginal word meaning 'red flowering tree'.  The botanical name is Telopea which means 'seen from afar'.  There are a small number of Telopea species, only 5, with the biggest and most showy being Telopea Speciosissima from New South Wales.  It is that states floral emblem.  At Swallows Nest Farm we grow a number of types of waratahs including the Tasmanian Waratah, Telopea Truncata.  First to flower are the Shady Lady - they are a rich cool red.  "Shady Lady" is a hybrid form of Waratah, a cross between the T. Speciosissima and T. Oreades.

Waratah buds form at the end of long stems which grow mainly over the spring and early summer months.  The buds swell over winter and in early spring, start to become a brighter red. 

Usually sometime in September, the buds start to unfold to reveal the many small flowers inside that will become the centre of the waratah. 

The unfolding process can take some time, and I think the flowers are really beautiful during this stage.

Once the outer bracts have unfolded, the central mass of individual flowers begin to bend and spread out, giving the waratah its well known shape.  

We still don't pick at this stage.  The flowers are prone to develop a blue tinge if picked too early.  They don't maintain their intense colour and won't open properly.

It's best to pick as the first few styles emerge from the individual flowers.  You can see in the picture above that the styles have begun to emerge on the back of this flower - facing north.  At the front edge you can just see the styles beginning to poke their way through.  The petal will fold as they emerge. 

  In the picture, almost all the styles have emerged. You can see the difference in the overall texture of the flower with the curled petals and the upright styles.

My Telopea Speciosissima are next to flower and they continue to flower up until December, depending on where they are planted.  I have some beautiful ones including this special one that is rosy pink, with white styles.  Its currently my favourite!

Such a gorgeous flower!  I love the colour, the white styles, and the rounded shape of this flower.  I hope to do some propagating, to see if I can reproduce more of them.

A close-up of the freshly emerged styles of this flower reveal the way waratahs present their pollen.  On the inside tip of the white styles you can see the rich red pollen.   It can be messy if the flower is handled a lot.  The bees love it!

I have really enjoyed using waratahs in some weddings recently.  Such a gorgeous colour!

And creating cheery arrangements is fun.  Spring means there's so much to choose from to team up with that stunning rich red.

Waratahs are deservedly one of the most prized Australian native cut flowers.  I love growing them!

November Wedding

November Wedding

Comment   

It's such a thrill to be part of someones special wedding day - I love doing flowers for weddings!  Erica's wedding was in November and in Tasmania that can be a tricky time for weather.  It was obviously not the case on that particular day!  What a wonderful spot for a wedding.

I "met" Erica internet style.  She was a customer in my trees4thewood online store and discovered my flower farming activities online.   Having worked on the Overland Track, a world famous bush walking track through spectacular Tasmanian wilderness, she was keen to use Tasmanian Waratahs for the main flower in her wedding bouquet.  These gorgeous flowers grow wild in areas along the track and you can't miss them when they are in flower.  

I was excited to be asked to provide her flowers and had a ball creating something to show off the Tasmanian Waratah.  As you can see, the colours she chose for the wedding are really styled around the waratah.  Ivory, grey and red are a classic combination.

What a fabulous day for a beach wedding!  The colour of that sea is just spectacular.  And I think it really makes that gorgeous red just glow.  The brides and bridesmaid's bouquets use Tasmanian Waratah, Safari Sunset Leucadendron, Berzelia (Button Bush), Agonis Flexuosa foliage and Eucalyptus foliage.  We decided to remove the waratah's leaves so as not to have too much green in the bouquet.  At that time of year, red and green can look a little christmassy.

Mini bouquet for a 3 year old flower girl! Cute!! And what a handsome little guy too.

The grooms boutonniere or button hole - Berzelia (Button Bush), Waratah, Leucadendron and Agonis Flexuosa foliage.

Thanks so much for letting me be part of your day, Erica!  It looks like it was a very memorable and happy one.